L'Arbre, an important work of 1910, appeared at the decisive Salon des Indépendants of 1911, where Cubism emerged as a group manifestation and spread across the globe, at times shocking the general public.

Gleizes practically subjugates The Tree in the foreground—its thin trunk slightly off-center and foliage cropped at the top—to a secondary role within a meticulously geometric World landscape.

Although the landscape seems persuasively realistic (with its foreground, background and village in between), it is not an existing place somewhere between Paris and his studio at Courbevoie, consistent with Gleizes' method of bringing together various elements from different locations anteriorly observed in nature.

The superposition of hills with a succession of brown, grey and white planes throughout this painting—providing a sense of temporal duration and spatial extension to the immense vista—along with the cubic architectural structures cutting through the center of the canvas, each with its own perspective, are very typical of the core group of Gleizes' landscapes.

[2] His 1911 Paysage à Meudon followed, in which "Man is reintroduced, but subordinated to the heroic concept of landscape which simultaneously comprehends the close and the distant, the earth's curve, the sun, even the force of wind against trees".

The anti-Hellenic concept of representing a subject from multiple points of view was a central idea of Jean Metzinger's Note sur la Peinture article of 1910.

Painters saw what they had in common, poets joined them, feelings of sympathy were established, a general atmosphere began to form which would soon produce an action whose effects were to be quickly felt in the surrounding world.